The legal fallout can be substantial. Former World in Action investigative reporter Donald MacIntyre kick-started the current trend for undercover with his series MacIntyre Undercover for the BBC in 1999. It was allegedly then the most expensive current affairs series ever made, Figure 2.1
Undercover Mosque proves the value of covert filming technology
and was a largely successful attempt to find a contemporary frame for a programme genre in popular decline. In the four programmes of this series, MacIntyre infiltrated: a gang of football hooligans; the model girl demi-monde and their ‘fashion victims’; a bunch of Nigerian con men; and an old people’s care home in Kent where inmates were prey to abuse.
One of the hooligans was subsequently jailed and the care home was closed, with two people cautioned by the police for five incidences of assault on their elderly charges. Despite this, the police made unsubstantiated defamatory allegations about the programme being selectively edited, which were duly printed in The Sunday Telegraph. In a reversal of the usual roles, it was then MacIntyre who sued the police for libel, and who eventually won their apology and substantial damages in court. It was an important vindication for the journalist and the credibility of undercover investigations. MacIntyre had been clear about this when undertaking the action, with the BBC’s full support:
In making these allegations, they have both damaged my personal reputation as a journalist and brought the reputation of the BBC’s journalism into question. It is a funda-mental purpose of journalism to give voice to those who, because of their circum-stances, are unable to speak for themselves. It would not serve the public interest if our findings were diminished by totally unfounded and defamatory comments made by Kent Police.5
These are laudable motives and MacIntyre already had a substantial reputation to defend.
He had won two Royal Television Society journalism awards for his 1996 investigations for ITV’s World In Action, into the links between drug dealers and the private security firms who control nightclub doors. But, as the BBC programme’s title suggests, he was also protecting a brand, the MacIntyre name. This raises more difficult issues regarding the whole practice of undercover investigation, which logically requires anonymity. Even in the making of the series MacIntyre Undercover, the reporter regularly risked blowing his cover and endangering his safety by recording pieces to camera in situ, such as in the bar where the fashion world bigwigs were secretly filmed taking advantage of their young models.6It might be argued that these pieces added nothing to the investigations, and could have jeopardised them, but added substantially to the brand MacIntyre. It did however make a second series of MacIntyre Undercover impossible, because his face was now very well known. MacIntyre himself was under no illusions about the service he was there to perform:
Journalism is too small or too distant a word to cover it. It is theatre; there are no second takes. It is drama – it is improvisation, infiltration and psychological warfare.7
There is a small handful of investigative video-journalists working for broadcast in the UK, whose operation relies upon their anonymity, and who not only will not allow their face to be seen on screen but never allow their real name to appear in the credits. For them, the self-serving antics of a MacIntyre would be an anathema, and professional suicide. MacIntyre himself has gone on to present television programmes on other subjects, such as weather phenomena and wildlife, for BBC1 and UK Channel Five. He returned to something of the criminal world with another series for Five called MacIntyre’s Underworld, and another form of undercover in MacIntyre’s Big Sting.8In the latter he turns the table on criminals and con men by conning them, inviting fraudsters on to stage only to be arrested, or leaving a television
set in the back of a car so that a local thief would steal it. The technology involved, such as the bug inside the set, add a frisson for the audience but, as MacIntyre beards the gull who bought the stolen TV set in his local pub and humiliates him and his family for our self-righteous entertainment, we wonder what greater good is served. Director of the London Centre for Investigative Journalism, Gavin MacFadyen, feels the whole ‘undercover’ genre is grossly overplayed, and can demean the work of serious investigative journalism:
Anyone who puts ‘Undercover’ in the title is doing it just for sensation. An investiga-tive journalist uses undercover techniques because there is no other way of getting the story. They can be useful and important, but they are a method of last resort.9
Undercover brings other problems, not least with repetition, as one success is often hard to repeat, irrespective of the familiarity or otherwise of the reporter. One of the BBC’s most lauded undercover investigations was into a police training college in northern England.
The Secret Policeman featured a young reporter, Mark Daly, enlisting as a police recruit and going through basic training.10His hidden cameras and microphones revealed a subculture of rampant racism among his fellow recruits, and the film’s broadcast caused a storm of outrage, not least from the police, still bruised by having been branded ‘institutionally racist’
by the Stephen Lawrence inquiry in 1999.11The most bigoted of the police recruits filmed, PC Rob Pulling, was heard saying that Lawrence ‘deserved to die’ and his parents were
‘spongers’, as well as saying Hitler ‘had the right idea’ and he would kill an Asian ‘if I could get away with burying the fucker under a train track’. Pulling and 11 others resigned or were sacked by the police, but Daly, whose cover was blown before transmission, was arrested on suspicion of ‘obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception and damaging police property’.12 He had apparently adapted his bullet proof vest to take the hidden camera lens. The charges were eventually dropped, but were indicative of a culture of suppression of the truth, rather than its confrontation, in the police hierarchy. The BBC’s then chief legal officer Glen del Medico revealed that the Greater Manchester police made strenuous efforts at the highest level to stop the film being transmitted:
There were very hairy meetings between senior levels of Greater Manchester police and senior levels of the BBC. It’s a bit of a commentary on the way in which the police do not necessarily have a great deal of interest in fighting racism.13
Del Medico and other BBC executives rightly consider this one of the best exposés the BBC has ever made, but were all too aware of the dangers they faced. Although they had sufficient circumstantial information to justify the investigation, had Daly been caught before he had recorded any of the damning evidence, he and the BBC would have been vulnerable to the most savage retaliation from police and government. As it was, the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, initially accused the BBC of ‘a covert stunt’, acting as an agent provocateur, creating not reporting the story,14though on hearing the film he was persuaded to recant, calling the evidence ‘horrendous’. Following the impact of The Secret Policeman, producer Simon Ford was under pressure to repeat its successful undercover formula. For this he needed a new target and a new reporter. The result was The Secret Agent, in which reporter Jason Gwynne infiltrated the British National Party, proving they enjoy racist views.15One unsympathetic reviewer commented that this was as revelatory as finding
Catholicism in the Vatican.16The film did lead to BNP leader Nick Griffin being charged with incitement to racial hatred, but he was eventually found not guilty in 2006. Since the film showed Griffin saying at a public meeting that Islam was a ‘wicked religion’ and that Muslims were turning Britain into ‘a multiracial hell-hole’, it suggests that Britain’s race and religious hate laws are inadequate, arguably leaving the BNP strengthened, rather than diminished by the film. One of the obvious limitations of undercover, observational documentary is that this form militates against comment and analysis, whereas investigative work presupposes a sabre-toothed moral.